Evolving wounds: Cultural trauma, the atomic bomb, and September 11

The shocking and unprecedented attacks of September 11 brought home to Americans the reality that the twenty-first century is a very different world than the imagined community of their childhood. As such, it is not surprising that many would seek familiar models from the past through which to understand this new transnational threat of global terror—an enemy without borders, natural resources, an organized military, or a red phone. Yet the post-9/11 insistence on understanding the attacks through a peculiarly nuclear orientation--the use of the nuclear designation Ground Zero for the World Trade Center Plaza and the privileging of nuclear-arming nations over terrorist-sponsor states through the Axis of Evil —is exceedingly problematic. By transposing Cold War imagery and logic onto a vastly different threat in the War on Terror, the US inappropriately aligns their political, economic, and military motivations, and despite much excellent work on the subject, misdirects scholarly inquiries into literature written after 1945. Evolving Wounds: Cultural Trauma, the Atomic Bomb, and 9/11 addresses this problem by rethinking the assumptions underlying cultural trauma theory to chart a more salient and robust history of the subtle traces of America\u27s atomic legacy and its resurgence after 9/11. Pairing close readings of Cold War texts with 9/11 novels, I apply my new theory of cultural trauma to the tracing of the thematic and stylistic continuity between the two historical moments. Evolving Wounds makes significant contributions to the study of modern and postmodern literature, transnational studies, and the contemporary political occasion by opening up lines of inquiry into the subtle cultural inheritances of Americans. This cultural underhistory demands excavation for the sake of both a better understanding of the state of exception posed by the 9/11 attacks and an interrogation of the complicated structures that bind literature to history in the human mind